Today’s lesson: Pirating games = jail time and fines

The man behind an obvious Nintendo rip-off console has been handed a sentence …

If you walked through a mall in the United States over the past couple of years, odds are that you saw the Power Player Super Joy console on sale at one of those center-aisle carts that were filled with cheap technology. I remember seeing them occasionally and wondering how the manufacturer managed to get away with ripping off Nintendo's controller designs and (after looking at the box) several games in such a blatant manner. It turns out Kifah Maswadi, the man behind these consoles, didn't actually get away with this piracy: Nintendo found out about the Power Player and got the US government involved in shutting down the pirate's operation.

GamePolitics is reporting that Maswadi has not only been sentenced to 15 months of prison time, but he's also been handed a $415,000 fine. He will also serve another three years of supervised release and perform a total of 50 hours of community service which he'll use to educate the public about "the perils of criminal copyright infringement." Federal agents are claiming that Maswadi made $390,000 from his console's sales; the official report is that over 8,500 were sold.

This isn't the first arrest/conviction related to handheld consoles: in 2005, Yonathan Cohen was arrested by the FBI and pleaded guilty to selling pirated games. He was subsequently sentenced to five years in a federal prison and required to place ads in mall magazines to tell the public how he illegally sold knockoffs of popular video games at Mall of America kiosks. A few days after his plea, FBI agents managed to apprehend four Chinese nationals who had approximately 60,000 Power Player consoles in their storage facility.

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